A conference report: The UK's first Ayurveda and integrative healthcare summit

Since its founding after the Second War World, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) has been celebrated as one of the UK's greatest accomplishments [1]. Central to its success, is its emphasis on equitable provision of high-quality health care, which is free at point of access. Despite an increased budget allocation, the NHS's ability to provide fair and high-quality health care for all in the UK is increasingly jeopardised by an ageing population, rising pharmaceutical expenditure, workforce supply challenges, rising mental health disorders and chronic diseases. In addition, the NHS's current biomedicalised and urban-centric model of health care is not designed to support people's desires to develop greater embodied self-care and population self-reliance [2], [3], [4].